Tmux and Vim – better together

I was in a similar situation. I had a lot of junk in my config files from when I started learning vim seriously, a lot of which I never really used. I've recently started to rebuild them to try and simplify things, cut out the unused but "neat" stuff I added over time, etc. Kind of the nuclear option, and largely a result of a failure to adequately comment my dotfiles.

That's the tradeoff with editors like emacs and vim, unfortunately. Pretty much everything can be customized or tweaked, but it's mostly on you to explicitly do so. Spacemacs/SpaceVim/SpaceNeovim are some impressive default experiences, but they achieve that through large, complex config files that make it difficult for beginners to parse. I was recently talking to a friend who was thinking of switching to vim, and to be honest, I was a bit unsure about recommending one of those configurations when asked for a good default. They have some fairly well-defined conventions of their own, and while that allows some pretty neat stuff, it struck me as limiting for the beginner. With a configuration that's so tightly written (not sure if that's the best way to put it), I kind of felt like I was setting them up to use vim, but not be vim users. They might make tweaks in the future, but they might never dig deeper to really customize it. Or worse yet, even realize they can beyond a sort of intellectual acknowledgement of the possibility.

At that point, they might as well be using Atom, ST, or another GUI editor.

Indeed, but it doesn't really matter since the default experience in VSCode or IntelliJ or Xcode or any other IDE or editor doesn't work for me out of the box either. I have to change things anyways, and I can't change VSCode or IntelliJ or Xcode to fit my liking, but I've been able to change tmux+vim to it, although it could be even better.

> If you want IDE like features i.e Autocomplete than you have to spend days to make it work and even after that it doesn't work like other "GUI" editors.

For stuff like Go, Rust, Elixir, Python and so on, it works fine with when just installing the default "brand" plugin. Taking python as an example: even though "intellisense" in vim is worse than in pycharm, the rest of pycharm is so much worse than tmux+vim. "Intellisense" not being 100% in tmux+vim is not a dealbreaker for me at all. I can get by without "intellisense". But pycharm is so much worse for everything else than "intellisense", from basic editing to opening files to running shell commands and everything else I use all the time, which is a deal-breaker for me. For something like iOS+Mac development where I feel like I can't work without proper "intellisense", I do use Xcode.

> + Terminal interface is very limiting to have nice plugins...

Indeed, but still, even though tmux+vim sucks on some points because it's text-based, it doesn't suck enough to not be usable, and all these other editors and IDEs like IntelliJ, xcode, netbeans, sublimetext, vscode, atom and so on complete sucks for all the important things I need, which is a deal-breaker.

0. https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

https://awhan.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/copy-paste-in-tmux/

I'm just learning all of this, but since it's a suggestion from some smart people I bet, just like in vim, that you can do a lot more once you've overcome the first pain of using it correctly.